We might also want to write a little announcement to inform users about this change. While most of them wont be affected, some would have to adjust their custom scripts. And for those who use netinstall on a 2009.02 or older iso would have to run pacman -Syu once to get a version of libarchive which is able to deal with xz.
If we do this, we should leave pacman and libarchive in a historic format for quite a while (or forever). Those packages are already small enough it doesn't really matter.
I was going to respond to this thread and say we should keep a small subset of packages in tar.gz format for things like this. Most of them happen to be mine, but: * pacman * libarchive * libfetch * zlib ? * glibc ? * bash ?
+1. At some point pacman is going to need a glibc update to work and not being able to install glibc because it's a xz is an issue. We should probably add a versioned glibc to pacman's depends so someone doesn't end up upgrading pacman and not being able to run it because glibc didn't get updated as well. Dale